' Then, after a
moment's pause--'You could give us some very good advice about the
furniture. Come to the palace one of these days. I am always there from
ten to twelve.'
He took advantage of a moment when Lord Heathfield was talking to Giulio
Musellaro, who had just entered the box, to say to her, looking her full
in the eyes.
'To-morrow?'
'By all means,' she replied with perfect simplicity, as if she had not
noticed the tone of his question.
The next morning, about eleven, he set off on foot to the Palazzo
Barberini through the Via Sistina. It was a road he had often traversed
before--and, for a moment, the impressions of those days seemed to come
back to him, and his heart swelled. The fountain of Bernini shone
curiously luminous in the sunshine, as if the dolphins and the Triton
with his conch-shell had, by some interrupted metamorphose transformed
themselves into a more diaphanous material--not stone, nor yet quite
crystal. The noise of the building of new Rome filled all the piazza and
the adjoining streets; country children ran in and out between the carts
and horses offering violets for sale.
As he passed through the gate and entered the garden, he felt that he
was beginning to tremble. 'Then I _do_ love her still?' he thought to
himself--'Is she still the woman of _my dreams_?'
He looked at the great palace, radiant under the morning sun, and his
spirit flew back to the days when, in certain chill and misty dawns,
this same palace had assumed for him a look of enchantment.
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